BADLANDS: From Lineage to Landscape: A talk with Christopher Kurtz & Glenn Adamson
To coincide with PAD and Frieze London, join artist Christopher Kurtz and curator, writer and historian Glenn Adamson for a conversation exploring the ideas behind BADLANDS, Kurtz's career-spanning survey at Sarah Myerscough Gallery.
Taking its title from the eroded terrain of South Dakota — a landscape embedded in Kurtz's own history — the exhibition centres on a monumental installation of 3,000 wooden "skipping stones," accumulated from two decades of studio offcuts into an immersive landscape for visitors to walk through and rearrange. Alongside this, the gallery's upper floors present Kurtz's design practice: labour-intensive functional works including Between Us: Tête-à-Tête, his 2024 collaboration with textile artist Dana Barnes.
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Adamson, whose accompanying essay Some Assembly Required situates Kurtz's practice at the intersection of craft, nature and philosophy — drawing on Sara Imari Walker's "assembly theory" and the shifting scales of the American West — will talk with Kurtz about the origins, process and ideas that shape BADLANDS: resistance and repetition as a way of working, the accumulation of time within objects, and the blurred line between natural process and human intervention.
Glenn Adamson is a curator, writer and historian based in New York and London, and former Director of the Museum of Arts and Design and Head of Research at the V&A. His publications include Fewer Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects (2018), Objects: USA 2020, Craft: An American History (2021), and, most recently, A Century of Tomorrows(Bloomsbury, 2024).
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Badlands
Christopher Kurtz 18 September - 7 November 2026
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